


It’s Only Been A Lifetime

by th_esaurus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 22:53:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7011526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky studies him, lengthy and lingering. It's dim with nightfall, but both of them can see, cat-like, in the dark. When he speaks, it's quiet and thin. "D'you think we're safe?" He asks. </p><p>It's not the question Steve expected. "No," he admits. "I don't think we ever will be, Buck."</p>
            </blockquote>





	It’s Only Been A Lifetime

**Author's Note:**

> Destronomics wanted a fic about Bucky's post-Civil War arm. Here's my attempt. With thanks to everyone who let me throw this at them while I was writing it; you helped me press on.
> 
> This is unforgivably meandering.

They hike two days before they decide they need rest. A map and a compass tells Steve they're another fourteen hours or so from the cabin, but there is no impetus to push straight through. Nobody is combing the forests for them yet.

The cabin is Clint's, and when Steve was keeping a low profile two years back, he'd have thought it an unwise safe-house. But Clint had kept a family from them; he could sure as hell keep a little shack in the hills quiet. Slipped Steve the co-ordinates in a coded letter that Bucky burnt afterwards. Paranoia got them on the move, but the reassurance of having someone on your six keeps their pace easy.

"Hold up," Steve says, at the next copse they reach. It's already deep night, and they're traveling by starlight and inhuman eyes. "Let's park it here for a few hours."

"Steve," Bucky says mildly, shrugging his left shoulder. He's shredded through the ball of t-shirts and packing tape they'd improvised around the garroted stump of his metal arm. Likely the wires have been scratching a trail in soft trees along their path. Hansel and Gretel.

"C'mere," Steve says, putting his rucksack down and rifling through. He pulls out bandages and more tape, rips them with his teeth. Carefully wraps the exposed innards of Bucky's arm. He's no idea if they are sensitive, still nerve endings, rasping against the cotton and cold air, and Bucky hides his pain as quietly as a dog.

Steve is still—careful about his lines of questioning.

It's exactly the sort of night that reminds Steve of their long troop outside Azzano, from the Hydra stronghold back to base. Sweat making the back of his neck cold, a warm buzz in his thighs and calves from the hike, not tired but a numbness from being constantly awake and alert. He and Bucky had been at the front, uncomplaining and relentless, pulling the rest of the men forward with each heavy step.

Bucky should've been on a goddamn stretcher.

"It doesn't hurt," Bucky says. There is no reason to be quiet out here, and he doesn't bother to be; just matter of fact.

"I wasn't sure," Steve says, exhaling and tugging the bandages a little tighter. One of the thick cables drags straight through the flimsy cotton, and they spend a minute or two between them trying to snag it up on one of the rougher edges, keep it curled inwards.

"That might have to do," Steve admits. Bucky looks small, like this, bundled in a thick jacket with the sleeve torn off, hiking boots, a mess of cloth and wires at his shoulder. Steve was never a fool when they were young, even if he was sometimes foolish; he'd known Bucky's compunction to protect him. Bristled at it daily.

He knows, a little, of what Bucky felt like then, he thinks.

It isn't the sort of empathy he's comfortable with.

They don't sleep. They eat, though, ravenously, hunger less easy to stave off than exhaustion. That was one of the hardest things while he was on the run, Bucky says mildly, as they eat oat bars, jerky, salt and protein. "Hungry all the time, you know? Trying to find the money to eat. Just like the old days, huh?"

Steve smiles tightly. Not quite like the old days.

Bucky had never resorted to petty thievery back then. Steve's pride and anger was a deterrent but Buck was a stubborn mule too: charmed a waitress or two out of a free drink and a plate of fries, but that was as far as his morals stretched.

Morals are elastic, but put enough strain on them—

"You were surviving," Steve says firmly.

"Absolving me of my lesser sins, right?" Bucky replies, an easy grin on his lips.

"I can't remember the last time I went to church," Steve says, trying to smile back.

"1932. My mom forced us. She'd got friendly with that pastor, remember? Suddenly all paranoid weren't clocking up enough holy hours on our souls."

Steve remembers. Bucky had told him blithely that he wouldn't mind going to hell, so long as Steve was there beside him.

Well, hell had come to find Bucky, and Steve had been nowhere in sight.

Steve is quiet. He suspects he dozes off for half an hour, because he blinks and feels oddly refreshed, and Bucky is looking at him. Not glancing; watching, like he's been doing so for a long time. His eyes are dark and soft, perpetually tired, and Steve struggles to recall a time they weren't.

"You ready, Buck?"

Bucky nods, short and sharp, hoists his rucksack on his back and buckles it across his chest. Tugs on the bandages around his stump, frowns, but has to make do.

It occurs to Steve that Bucky would probably troop on with neither sleep nor food for as long as he was told to. That, after all, was his modus operandi for a very long time.

Steve despises that half of what he knows about Bucky come from a flimsy Manila file. "We can stay a while if—"

Bucky snorts out a low laugh and shakes Steve's shoulder a little to hustle him. It's the first—

It's the first casual touch Bucky has laid on him in seventy years. His hand is only there for a split second, through two layers of thermals, but it burns, and Buck's gaze lingers on the spot like he isn't sure he left a mark.

"Come on," he says, gruff.

Dusk and dawn pass again before they reach the cabin. Steve's stomach twists as he sees it; not the shack he was expecting but a homely little place, somewhere to bring the kids, not long ago built. It's high up on a craggy outcrop, trees thick either side, almost like the crow's nest of a ship. A vantage point.

There used to be a winding wooden staircase, trailing right up to the porch. They can see it from the metal rods driven into the rock face. Just a pile of kindling now. Another gift from Clint.

Any other day, they could have taken the climb in minutes. Steve takes a first trip up with their rucksacks, antsy to leave Bucky at the bottom and antsy to leave the bags at the top. But the sheer incline of the rock and Bucky's single arm aren't a great combination; Steve clambers back down and begins the climb again, stopping at every handhold to hoist Bucky up after him.

Bucky's family apartment, way back in Brooklyn, had been on the top floor of their building. The rooftop, technically, was private property and out of bounds, but they had clambered up there on stuffy nights, watching the stars and the city. They weren't the only ones, and Bucky often looked for dropped cigarette stubs long enough to light again. Used free matchbooks from the bar he worked, blew the greasy smoke away from Steve.

The ladder up to the roof hung high on the wall to deter thieves and bored kids. Bucky had hoisted Steve up on his shoulders, waited patiently while Steve struggled to pull himself up the bottom rung, happy to have his shoulders used as sturdy ground. It seemed to Steve like Bucky unconsciously rubbed salt into the wound when he followed with an easy leap, his strong arms more than capable of swinging his weight up the ladder.

Steve thinks about airing this memory. Bucky grunts hard as Steve hoists him up, the strain all on his good arm.

"Nearly there," Steve says, and doesn't venture anything more.

There was an evening he remembers, up on that roof, a dusty twilight with the smoke rising up from the city to tickle their noses. Steve and Bucky sat with the stony edge of the building jutting into the backs of their knees, their feet swaying above the sheer drop. Steve stretched up, his weak bones popping back into place, and then laid back on his elbows, watching the trails of steam from the apartment vents meander up into the sky. Too light in the city for stars, but he likes the inky darkness of the sky, the smoke splitting it like milk swirling into coffee.

Buck had leant forward a little longer, looking over the lip of the world, taking a few lazy drags on his second hand cigarette. Then he flicked it in a perfect curve, and flopped lazily back next to Steve, pulling his feet up so he could lie fully back.

His left hand was casually close to Steve's right. Their pinky fingers brushing. Steve felt Bucky's muscles twitch, and then Bucky laid his littlest two fingers right over the top of Steve's. Not brushing, not stroking, just there, just a presence.

It was not discussed, and Bucky's touch left him just as easily when they made their move back inside.

Steve grips Bucky's hand tight in both of his own and pulls him up to the smashed up porch of the cabin. Bucky finds his feet, his teeth gritted in exertion, and doesn't say anything about the fact that Steve doesn't let go once he's steady. A few seconds, just catching his breath, Steve clinging on like Bucky's wrist is the next handhold.

The place looks ransacked. To deter any would-be thieves and trackers, Steve supposes; why flip a place that's already been turned? They track through the shattered glass of a coffee table, prop some boards up against the smashed window. Under the mess, the cabin is pretty and petite; just one main room, spacious, with a kitchenette in the corner and a mezzanine above, though the ladder up to it is carved in two. A bathroom, tub, no shower. Succulents in little ceramic pots daubed with kid's fingerprints in gaudy paint, lined up above the sink; a reminder that this is all Clint's clever handiwork. Steve's stomach feels heavy as he glances past the mementos.

There's a double bed up above, and two little Murphy beds that fold into wardrobes against the wall. One is hanging from its hinges, and Steve rips it from the wall, manhandles it out the back door, to make more room.

Though it's just the two of them, they are larger men than they used to be. They seem to take up an extraordinary amount of space.

Or maybe Steve just feels ungainly.

They should rest, three days of trekking on their heels, but stopping now means talking, planning, acknowledging the fact they ran with Steve's suggestion to go off grid. He hadn't said for how long.

"Let's see what's left," Steve says instead. Small missions, task by task.

Bucky unearths a cell phone in a drawer with a cracked screen but a working SIM card, and a number in its contacts list of a grocer who'll leave food in a safe cache for them every other week. A post it on the phone reads: _pay me back!!!_ There are cans and utensils in the cupboards, two helpfully unbroken plates, plastic cups, aspirin. A tool kit and hiking boots by the back door, though the boots are too small for either of them. Most of the books are damaged from the ransacking, but one looks suspiciously pristine: a potted history of 20th century America.

"Hilarious," Steve says, dry but smiling.

"Wonder how many times I'm in here," Bucky says lightly, thumbing through the pages.

Steve supposes a Stark-funded safe house would have untraceable wifi, underground bunkers, tools for fixing up Bucky's dead arm and an espresso machine that takes seven people to operate. But going to Tony for help is—

No longer an option.

Steve had found out about Howard Stark's fate from the dog-eared file Natasha lent him. It was mentioned, deeply encrypted, in the leaked Hydra data as well, but obtusely, coded, a factual report of a frighteningly personal event. He'd spent a night with Sam getting not drunk in the slightest on grocery store beer, his eyes red raw, his tongue loose. Mourned more for Bucky than Howard that night.

"I never knew Maria," he had managed. "I never even knew her."

He watches Bucky nudge a pile of debris aside with his foot, oddly dexterous. Watches him unconsciously slick his long hair back, the same way he would when it was short and handsome. It's not that Steve believes Bucky incapable of great acts of violence. They both are. But it seems so much like that violence is hidden in the shadows of him: the dark patch in the joint of his elbow, or the bruised hollows under his eyes, or the crescent of black under his jaw line. A burst of unrelenting light, and Bucky's dark parts would have nowhere to hide.

Steve has his own shadows.

Bucky looks up at Steve, his eyebrows tilting up and then into a frown. "You gotta sleep," he says, and as soon as he acknowledges it, Steve can feel his exhaustion in the very marrow of his bones.

"I'm good—" he tries.

"Like hell," Bucky bats back. "Sleep. I gotta see what I can do about—" he gestures to the stump of his arm. The bandages are useless. Unraveling again.

"You'll work better with an extra pair of hands."

"Mocking a cripple?" Bucky says, grinning. He always was blunt. "Ain't like you, Steve."

"I got polite," Steve says, a warmth spreading through him. "Except when I'm not."

"Gotta keep up the pretence," Buck agrees.

Steve hesitates for a second. Then— "Come on. We both need the shut-eye."

The duvet is dusty and they give it a good shakedown, dust settling like snow on the wooden slats up above and the quaint rug on the floor. It greys Bucky's hair, reminds Steve how goddamn old they are. Part of him wishes he ached more; not the jagged pain of his youth, the way his shins froze up if he ran more than five steps, the struggle to get enough air in his collapsing lungs. He just wishes he were worn out, like a regular guy after a tough hike.

There is sweat beading Bucky's forehead. Steve helps him with his jacket, lays it somewhere clean; kneels at Bucky's feet and unties his boots. He half expects Buck to protest, roll his eyes at being coddled, exactly the way Steve used to; but he's quiet again, watching Steve intently.

Asking him what he's thinking feels strikingly dangerous, even to a man on the run.

They lie back to back, facing the exit points: Bucky looking to the unbroken skylight, and Steve towards the lip of the mezzanine. His eyes glaze over after a while, so that it becomes almost a gauzy horizon.

They had never—

There weren't rumours back then, because times were different and men were physical, close, without being suspect. In the meantime, Steve has found, while he was in the ice, there have been crass articles published, more sensitive discourses too, musing upon the nature of his relationship with James Buchanan Barnes.

They had never shared a bed until now. Never really thought to. They'd sleep close, pile the cushions from Bucky's mom's drab sofa on the floor next to Buck's single bed, so they could chat shit deep into the night. His pa yelled incoherent abuse through the wall when they were too loud, too late, and they'd fade into whispers: about girls, about the funnies in today's paper, about the murmurs of war, about the future. Bucky's idle visions were always much clearer; Steve's future was a vague thing he never fully believed he'd live to see. It fell to Bucky to imagine how Steve Rogers would shape up. The colour of his wife's hair, the names of his three kids, how many bucks he'd make a week for his art in the advertising biz.

"Whatever you say, Buck," Steve always told him.

The sticking point, the one consistent thread, was always that they'd still be buddies. Neither of them foresaw a seventy year gap in their friendship.

Abruptly, Steve rolls over. Puts his nose and forehead to the nape of Bucky's neck, the bare slip of skin between his undershirt and his dank hair. Steve breathes him in. He smells of burnt copper, of exertion, grease and pine. The bodily smell he used to cover up with strong, cheap cologne. Steve keeps his hands to himself, his body curled away from Bucky's hips, but his mouth is open, inhaling, a strand of Bucky's hair clinging to his lips.

"Hey," Bucky murmurs, still but soft. "What's up?"

A lie would be safest, but silence feels less dangerous than the truth. Steve had expected Bucky by his side for all those years; he just wants to make up for lost time.

Bucky seems to agree with his loss of words. He turns over, carefully, his ragged metal shoulder scratching at the bedsheets. Steve shifts back enough to give him space, but not enough that they cannot feel each other's breath on their faces.

He can't recall a specific time he ever thought of this. Doesn't remember any particular pang of jealousy he'd ever felt when Buck regaled him with stories of dancing girls with plump lips and rouged cheeks. Maybe he dreamt of Bucky, but why wouldn't he? Bucky was ever-present, always on his mind.

What he knows for sure: he'd be content if he never let Bucky out of his sight again.

Bucky studies him, lengthy and lingering. It's dim with nightfall, but both of them can see, cat-like, in the dark. When he speaks, it's quiet and thin. "D'you think we're safe?" He asks.

It's not the question Steve expected. "No," he admits. "I don't think we ever will be, Buck."

Bucky seems soothed by the bluntness of it, somehow. He nods, and there is dust on his eyelashes. It occurs to Steve that he had no idea, really, what Bucky was thinking about all those years ago. What he was dreaming about. Whose lips he imagined he might be kissing.

Bucky only needs to nudge forward to close up the space between their mouths, and he does it.

They're so damn shy at the start. Bucky's barely parted lips little more than resting against Steve's. It doesn't feel unfamiliar, somehow. The physical sensation of it is all new, Bucky's lips and skin rough from the dry mountain air, his thick stubble, a strand of his hair caught between their mouths. But it doesn't feel strange.

Steve reaches up to brush Bucky's long hair behind his ear; the feel of it slipping from between their lips is sullen and intimate, and Steve presses in, his body against Buck's, forcing the air out from between them. Flashes of memory, things he thought nothing of at the time, seem like missed opportunities in retrospect: when they were kids, barely in their teens, laughing at how they could see their breath in winter, even indoors; nuzzled up together on the floor to watch the puffs of air form and vanish, sharing the brief warmth of it on their faces. When Steve had been ill once or twice, he remembers Bucky pulling him up out of bed to hold him, Bucky's cheek pressed fiercely against Steve's sweating temple; willing him to be good, to get better, or perhaps as close to a goodbye as Bucky ever got.

So much changed, since then.

Steve opens up his mouth a little way and Bucky takes the opportunity, grateful, his tongue warm on Steve's bottom lip, and then his teeth, and then his own tongue. His hand is felt but not seen - Steve must have closed his eyes; when? - a flicker of flesh on Steve's collarbone, neck, jaw, cheek. Steve doesn't dare interrupt his meandering. When the hell was the last time Bucky touched something with care?

They kiss like this for so long that Steve forgets. Forgets that the mattress under them is foreign and torn, that they can't settle here, that they aren't teenagers in a Brooklyn that hasn't yet sent them war. Forgets they haven't been doing this for years.

Bucky shifts in close, slips his leg through Steve's. They're neither of them hard, not yet, but—alert. Aware. It's a pleasant pressure. His tongue is getting insistent. "Alright, Buck," Steve murmurs, and he likes the way his voice sounds muted by Bucky's warm mouth.

At first it feels like a brand on his cheek, boiling and sudden. It takes him a moment to make sense of the pain: the crackle of nerve endings and the wet bubble of blood oozing down to his neck. He jerks, not backwards, but a spasm of delayed shock. "Bucky—"

"Fuck," Bucky hisses. His reflexes are whippet fast, and he's on his knees above Steve in an instant, ripping a strip from his undershirt - sweat-damp but dust free - and balling it to Steve's cheek. " _Fuck_ , must've—still feels like my goddamn arm is there sometimes—"

All Bucky had done was reach up with the wrong arm, to hold Steve's face with his phantom hand. Just at the right angle to catch him deep with his open wound, metal and wire, hewn into some accidental dagger.

"It's fine, Buck, it surprised me more than anything." Steve puts his hand on top of Bucky's, presses hard to soak up the blood and Bucky's guilt.

"What the fuck are we _doing here_?" Bucky hisses suddenly. He's been so mild, almost catatonically agreeable this whole time, that the burst of anger makes Steve serious.

"I should never have suggested it. We should've—you need medical care. I was—irresponsible."

Bucky slips his palm out from under Steve's, rubs his face, tired. They came up here to sleep, and they still need it. No matter what courses through their veins, both of them still have human parts. Vulnerable emotions. "When did I start listening to what you say?" He murmurs, a wry smile in his low voice, anger drained.

"Not a damn clue." Steve smiles back. It pulls at the scratch on his cheek, and he feels a fresh gush of blood spurt against the sodden cloth. Keeps smiling anyway, tight.

They both drop down from the mezzanine one-handed. Bucky hefts the toolbox from the back door into the bathroom, and Steve gives the medicine cabinet a once-over for band-aids or a needle and thread. No such luck. There's masking tape in with the tools and Bucky holds the roll between his knees and rips off long strips with his teeth; Steve dampens and wrings out a freshly ripped wad of cloth from a spare tee in his backpack. Folds it over itself, and again, then tapes it to the gash on his cheek.

He knows it'll heal fast. They both know it. In two days there'll barely be a scab, on the outside.

Steve is weary. Finally, he can feel it in the marrow of his bones, that utter exhaustion where all he needs is somewhere mostly warm and mostly safe to lay his head.

Bucky is still rooting through the toolbox. There's work to be done.

There's nothing electronic or particularly useful in there. A jigsaw would be best, or a sander; instead they have a hammer, nails, a spirit level. There's a half-finished treehouse in the yard, just about the height of Clint's kids; the only reason the toolbox is there in the first place. They luck out with a little pair of wire cutters. Sharp enough.

He could remember all the times Bucky patched him up after a fight. Ever since he was a little kid. Bucky pulled out more of Steve's milk teeth than his mom did; Steve knocking them loose with punches to the jaw, letting Buck yank one out, then telling his mom it fell, pure chance. Absurdly, he thinks about the time Bucky, twenty two, stepped on a bottle and sliced his foot up with cheap brown glass. They'd been out watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, Steve's birthday, a few stale bread rolls between them, cooing over the lights from a distant field. Couldn't afford the nickel to get into the park proper. They weren't the only ones. A nice crowd gathered out, as if to celebrate Steve's birth, picnics and beer. Bucky made that joke until it was old, every single year. Pointing out how happy people were that Steve had lasted another year.

Bucky had been drunk and barefoot in the grass. That was all. They limped home, Bucky hopping on one foot and leaning most of his weight on Steve's thin shoulders. Steve had picked the glass out of Bucky's foot in the little bathroom of his apartment, Bucky lying back in the bathtub with his bloody foot raised high over the rim, groaning at every tug. Steve got a pair of tweezers for the smallest shards. Thorough.

"Here, in the tub—" Steve starts, but Bucky's already lowering himself into the dry bath. His metal stump hangs over the side. A thin line of Steve's blood on the jagged edge of Bucky's arm. As though it's bleeding.

It's agonisingly slow work. Steve trims the wires first, cutting up deep inside the hollow of his arm so there are no low-hanging stragglers. He pushes the tips, copper and plastic tubing, under the bathtub with his shoe. Bucky is quiet, pale. There might have been a time once when that arm had feeling, sensitive enough to feel a ripple in the air, the moment of a target. But Bucky assures Steve more than once that it's dead now.

He moves onto the shell. It's thick, unyielding, but Steve is strong and leans all his weight into each cut. "Is it—?" Steve starts, half way through, wondering if Bucky's arm is made of the same stuff as his shield. If—he could use that as a positive—

"It's not vibranium," Bucky says, staring at the ceiling. "It's an alloy. Titanium, magnesium mostly. The first one was heavier, but they replaced it at some point. While I was on ice."

He stops abruptly.

Steve realises he's also stopped. His hands completely still on Bucky's shoulder.

Ever so slowly, he moves his fingertips to just under Bucky's chin. Just touching there, no pressure, not pushing. Bucky raises his head with a sigh, and lets his lips stay parted.

Steve kisses him as softly as he can. It's not always easy to be gentle; it takes effort for a man used to grapple holds and defensive maneuvers. Upside down like this, his nose brushes Bucky's stubble awkwardly, and they both tilt their necks to fit their lips together. It's—

A gesture. A promise. An apology.

Steve lets his head drop onto Bucky's good shoulder for a moment.

"C'mon," Bucky says, husky. "Let's finish this."

It takes close to an hour to get Bucky's arm somewhere near smooth. Steve finds a few sheets of mostly unused sandpaper at the bottom of the toolbox and runs them over the metal rim until they rip into tatters. He can trace a finger over the finished edge without drawing blood. Bumps and ridges, and if he pressed harder it would scratch, but it's enough. It's enough, and that's the best they can hope for these days.

No more bandages in their bags. Steve sticks lines of masking tape across the gaping hole to try and cauterise it, wraps a final layer of t-shirt cotton around it and tapes that off too.

"Thanks, doc," Bucky says mildly. The more time he spends in Steve's company, the more of his Brooklyn twang seeps through, lazy and bold. But his sentences are much shorter, stilted. Like he's still relearning how to form them.

Steve has a hand resting on the crook of Bucky's neck. He doesn't want to let go.

He doesn't want to let go again.

"How's about that nap, Buck?" Steve asks lightly. His cheek still pulls and twinges when he smiles, but he smiles anyway.

"You got it, Cap," Bucky replies, little more than a murmur. It's been three quarters of a century since Bucky last called him that.

Back on Steve's six.

Neither of them knowing what's behind, and neither of them guessing what's in front.


End file.
